Being in the same business can make for an unusual level of understanding between husband and wife, but when they and the sons of each have opposite goals, the potential for trouble can skyrocket.
When Corea Lobster Cooperative manager Dwight Rodgers courted seafood buyer Ruth Goodwin, mother and business partner of one of his customers, Christopher Byers, of Winter Harbor’s DC Air (WWF Feb. 1008), neither thought it would present much of a problem. That was before DC Air expanded its seafood business and began buying much more lobster.
Dwight Rodgers’s main job – the main job of any co-op manager – is to get the highest price possible for the lobster he sells. “I’m always trying to keep the boat price as high as possible,” he said one recent Saturday afternoon at his place in Corea. “That’s my function in life.” As for lobster dealers, he said, “Their function is to pay as little as possible, so to that end I feel that I do a very good job.”
His lobster dealer wife, Ruth Rodgers, in rueful agreement, shot back, “You do too good a job, thank you very much.” Such a situation almost guarantees trouble.
Dwight said, “The advent of the co-op forced a lot of independent buyers to pay a bonus,” and that most buying stations base their boat price on that of the local co-op. “When I establish my boat price in Corea,” he said, “that price is followed by the local independent buying stations.” This includes DC Air, so many days a week Ruth hears her son rant about the price that lousy so-and-so, her husband, charges, then goes home to the so-and-so who raises her son’s blood pressure.
“Dwight and I survive because he’s very easy-going and lets me rant,” Ruth said. “Chris and I yell.” In fact, she added, she and Dwight “don’t see enough of each other to not get along.” He leaves for work before she gets up, gets home hours before she does, and goes to bed before she does. They share weekends and in season work on the beautifully kept grounds she designed.
Almost from the start, Ruth and Dwight, who married nine years ago, decided not to complain to each other about their adult children and to keep their businesses to themselves. Couples who work in competing businesses must keep private information about their companies to themselves to avoid accusations of collusion or insider trading.
Particularly trying days lead to evenings, Ruth said, “When we don’t say much to each other.” It’s safer that way. On the other hand, “We both work at our jobs 12 hours a day and we’ve had enough of our jobs when we get home,” she said. “Dwight and Chris have arguments as a dealer and a buyer,” [but] “Dwight doesn’t really complain about him.” To which Dwight explained, “That’s part of the separation of church and state,” adding, “a lot of the details of both our businesses stay in our heads.” Ruth agreed, saying, “It’s true. I try not to tell Dwight any more than I have to.”
Ruth manages a two-owner, thirty-employee seafood business that handles 10 species and for which, working from five different checkbooks, she writes 900 checks each week without bouncing a single one.
Dwight manages a 51-owner, five-employee business. Former co-op manager now Portland seafood processor John Norton once explained, “If a co-op has 20 members, the manager has 20 bosses. Each feels he should give directions on how the co-op should be run.” Norton called it the hardest job he ever had.
Ruth agreed, saying, “I think it takes a special kind of person to work with [that many] people. I think not very many people want that job.”
Around 40 Corea lobstermen formed the Corea Lobster Co-operative, Inc. in 1970. They had two managers before inviting Dwight to take the job in May 1976. He left almost four years later for other work. Five other managers came and went before Dwight took over again in 1992. In all, he’s been Corea’s manager for 20 years. He agreed with Ruth’s assessment, admitting, “It’s a high-turnover job. A lot of co-ops have had problems.” To his knowledge, only Steve Peabody, of the Beal’s-Jonesport Co-op, has managed a co-op longer. Peabody, in a phone interview, said he’d worked there six years before managing 22 more.
Secure in their jobs, Peabody and Dwight are forthright about general knowledge of their buyers, the people they sell to. Except for two or three lobster pounds, Peabody sells the rest of his co-op’s product to a single wholesaler. In fact, a number of co-ops sell to a single wholesaler.
Dwight sells most of his co-op’s lobsters to four wholesalers. “Roughly 90 percent of my lobsters, no matter whom I’m selling them to, are sold for the same price,” he explained. “The current boat price plus 70 cents.” Call it what you want, his spread, expenses, or margin is 70 cents. He said, “The other 10 percent is made up of retail sales: people that come down over the head of the wharf, and that can be anywhere from $1.50 to $2 over whatever the boat price is. You take the 70 cents, put it to one side, [and] add the $1.50 to $2 to the boat price.”
Then in between his regular wholesale customers and his retail customers, three or four times a week he provides lobster to a man who sells that and other seasonal foods from a roadside truck from spring until about Columbus Day. Dwight also supplies some restaurants, but said of these “in between” buyers, “They’re not the kind of people you can depend on to take all your product. They want five or six crates or 10 or 12 crates.”
This presents a problem because, unlike Ruth, who has two tank rooms she can lock at night, Dwight has no inside place where he can store leftover lobster. He tried locking pens and lobster cars, but thieves cut the locks and stole the lobster. He must sell everything he buys each day by the end of that day.
Asked how he manages this, he replied, “That’s part of my job. An increasing amount of my time is [spent] selling all my lobsters. I usually have certain days of the week assigned to certain buyers. We, the day’s buyer and I, come to an agreement on the price for the product [that day]. If we can’t come to agreement, I have to find another buyer. It doesn’t happen very often.” Surprisingly, considering the quality of the product he sells – his customers tell him lobster from the Corea Co-op is so well handled it has a longer shelf life than other lobster – Dwight does not have a waiting list. He explained, “I’ve narrowed it down over the years because one of the problems I’ve run into is, you have to find people that you can deal with whose money is good.” He went on to say, “Bad debt is something we all struggle to avoid. It’s a constant battle.” He said, “Debts have always been resolved,” but declined further comment other than saying, “In this day and age, it’s hard to find a number of dealers whose money you can trust.”
To which Ruth added, “You also have to have someone who’s big enough to be able to take the glut when it’s there and big enough so that when you don’t have anything, they’ll survive because they have several other people they can buy from: To take 200 crates in September, but are happy with ten in February.”
Even with Dwight and Ruth’s best efforts, not everyone thinks they’re on the up and up. Because Corea Co-op’s Massachusetts buyers hired Ruth and Chris’s freight division to truck their lobster for them, some people concluded DC Air buys all the co-op’s lobster. It doesn’t. “This has been a huge misconception,” Dwight said. “My board has asked me to have multiple buyers, and this I have done. DC Air is only one of the four wholesalers who, together, buy 90 percent of Corea Co-op’s lobster.” That some think he overprices his product, he admitted, “has been the source of a lot of heated discussions over the years with any of the people I sell lobster to. I have worked over the past … in total close to 20 years to put as much money in the fishermen’s pockets as I possibly could – I have always felt very strongly that that was my primary function. If people choose to disagree with that, that’s their right.”
Despite a dealer son who rants to his mother because he wants to buy for less and a fisherman son who sells to his father, the families of this lobster dealer mother and co-op manager father (including other family members and grandchildren on both sides) have learned to get along well enough to vacation together. Twice. They must be doing something right.